How Do You Set Smart SEO Goals for Your Team/Agency/Project? - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best fit for your organization? It's incredibly important that they tie into both your company goals and your marketing goals, as well as provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to set the right SEO goals for your team and shares two examples of how different businesses might go about doing just that.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about SEO goals, how to set smart ones, how to measure your progress against them, how to amplify those goals to the rest of your organization so that people really buy in to SEO.

This is a big challenge. So many folks that I've talked to in the field have basically said, "I'm not sure exactly how to set goals for our SEO team that are the right ones." I think that there's a particularly pernicious problem once Google took away the keyword-level data for SEO referrals.

So, from paid search, you can see this click was on this keyword and sent traffic to this page and then here's how it performed after that. In organic search, you can no longer do that. You haven't been able to do it for a few years now. Because of that removal, proving the return on investment for SEO has been really challenging. We'll talk in a future Whiteboard Friday about proving ROI. But let's focus here on how you get some smart SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain intelligently to the goals of the business, the organization.

Where to start:

So the first thing, the first problem that I see is that a lot of folks start here, which seems like a reasonable idea, but is actually a terrible idea. Don't start with your SEO goals. When your SEO team gets together or when you get together with your consultants, your agency, don't start with what the SEO goals should be.

Start with the company goals. This is what our company is trying to accomplish this quarter or this year or this month.

Marketing goals. Go from there to here's how marketing is going to contribute to those company goals. So if the company has a goal of increasing sales, marketing's job is what? Is marketing's job improving the conversion funnel? Is it getting more traffic to the top of the funnel? Is it bringing back more traffic that's already been to the site but needs to be re-earned? Those marketing goals should be tied directly to the company goals so that anyone and everyone in the organization can clearly see, "Here's why marketing is doing what they're doing."

SEO goals. Next, here's how SEO contributes to those marketing goals. So if the goal is around, as we mentioned, growing traffic to the top of the funnel, for example, SEO could be very broad in their targeting. If it's bringing people back, you've got to get much more narrow in your keyword targeting.

Specific metrics to measure and improve. From those SEO goals, you can get the outcome of specific metrics to measure and improve.

Measurable goal metrics

So that list is kind of right here. It's not very long. There are not that many things in the SEO world that we can truly measure directly. So measurable goal metrics might be things like...

1. Rankings. Which we can measure in three ways. We can measure them globally, nationally, or locally. You can choose to set those up.

2. Organic search visits. So this would be just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.

3. You can also separate that into branded search versus non-branded search. But it's much more challenging than it is with paid, because we don't have the keyword data. Thus, we have to use an implied or inferred model, where essentially we say, "These pages are likely to be receiving branded search traffic, versus these pages that are likely to be receiving non-branded search traffic."

A good example is the homepage of most brands is most likely to get primarily branded search traffic, whereas resource pages, blog pages, content marketing style pages, those are mostly going to get unbranded. So you can weight those appropriately as you see fit.

Tracking your rankings is crucially important, because that way you can see which pages show up for branded queries versus which pages show up for unbranded queries, and then you can build pretty darn good models of branded search versus non-branded search visits based on which landing pages are going to get traffic.

4. SERP ownership. So ideas around your reputation in the search results. So this is essentially looking at the page of search results that comes up for a given query and what results are in there. There might be things you don't like and don't want and things you really do want, and the success and failure can be measured directly through the rankings in the SERP.

5. Search volume. So for folks who are trying to improve their brand's affinity and reputation on the web and trying to grow the quantity of branded search, which is a good metric, you can look at that through things like Google Trends or through a Google AdWords campaign or through something like Moz's Keyword Explorer.

6. Links and link metrics. So you could look at the growth or shrinkage of links over time. You can measure that through things like the number of linking root domains, the total number of links. Authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed.

7. Referral traffic. And last, but not least, most SEO campaigns, especially those that focus on links or improving rankings, are going to also send referral traffic from the links that are built. So you can watch referral traffic and what those referrers are and whether they came from pages where you built links with SEO intent.

So taking all of these metrics, these should be applied to the SEO goals that you choose that match up with your marketing and company goals. I wanted to try and illustrate this, not just explain it, but illustrate it through two examples that are very different in what they're measuring.

Example one

So, first off, Taft Boots, they've been advertising like crazy to me on Instagram. Apparently, I must need new boots.

Grow online sales. Let's say that their big company goal for 2018 is "grow online sales to core U.S. customers, so the demographics and psychographics they're already reaching, by 30%."

Increase top of funnel website traffic by 50%. So marketing says, "All right, you know what? There's a bunch of ways to do that, but we think that our best opportunity to do that is to grow top of funnel, because we can see how top of funnel turns into sales over time, and we're going to target a number of 50% growth." This is awesome. This can turn into very measurable, actionable SEO goals.

Grow organic search visits 70%. We can say, "Okay, we know that search is going to contribute an outsized quantity of this 50% growth. So what we want to do is take search traffic up by 70%. How are we going to do that? We have four different plans.

A. We're going to increase our blog content, quality and quantity.

B. We're going to create new product pages that are more detailed, that are better optimized, that target good searches.

C. We're going to create a new resources section with some big content pieces.

D. We're going to improve our link profile and Domain Authority."

Now, you might say, "Wait a minute. Rand, this is a pretty common SEO methodology here." Yes, but many times this is not directly tied to the marketing goals, which is not directly tied to the business goals. If you want to have success as an SEO, you want to convince people to keep investing in you, you want to keep having that job or that consulting gig, you've got to connect these up.

From these, we can then say, "Okay, for each one, how do we measure it?" Well...

A. Quantity of content and search visits/piece. Blog content can be measured through the quantity of content we produce, the search visits that each of those pieces produce, and what the distribution and averages are.

B. Rankings and organic traffic. Is a great way to measure product pages and whether we're hitting our goals there.

C. Link growth, rankings, and traffic. That's a great way to measure the new resources section.

All of these, this big-picture goal is going to be measured by the contribution of search visits to essentially non-homepage and non-branded pages that contribute to the conversion funnel. So we have a methodology to create a smart goal and system here.

Example two

Another example, totally different, but let's try it out because I think that many folks have trouble connecting non-e-commerce pages, non-product stuff. So we're going to use Book-It Theatre. They're a theater group here in the Seattle area. They use the area beneath Seattle Center House as their space. They basically will take popular books and literature and convert them into plays. They'll adapt them into screenplays and then put on performances. It's quite good. We've been to a few shows, Geraldine and I have, and we really like them.

So their goal — I'm making this up, I don't actually know if this is their goal — but let's say they want to...

Attract theater goers from outside the Seattle area. So they're looking to hit tourists and critics, people who are not just locals, because they want to expand their brand.

Reach audiences in 4 key geographies — LA, Portland, Vancouver, Minneapolis. So they decide, "You know what? Marketing can contribute to this in four key geographies, and that's where we're going to focus a bunch of efforts — PR efforts, outreach efforts, offline media, and SEO. The four key geographies are Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, and Minneapolis. We think these are good theater-going towns where we can attract the right audiences."

So what are we going to do as SEOs? Well, as SEOs, we better figure out what's going to match up to this.

Drive traffic from these regions to Book-It Theatre's pages and to reviews of our show. So it's not just content on our site. We want to drive people to other critics and press that's reviewed us.

A. So we're going to create some geo landing pages, maybe some special offers for people from each of these cities.

B. We're going to identify third-party reviews and hopefully get critics who will write reviews, and we're going to ID those and try and drive traffic to them.

C. We're going to do the same with blog posts and informal critics.

D. We're going to build some content pages around the books that we're adapting, hoping to drive traffic, that's interested in those books, from all over the United States to our pages and hopefully to our show.

So there are ways to measure each of these.

A. Localized rankings in Moz Pro or a bunch of other rank tracking tools. You can set up geo-specific localized rankings. "I want to track rankings in Vancouver, British Columbia. I want to track rankings from Los Angeles, California." Those might look different than the ones you see here in Seattle, Washington.

B. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party reviews. We won't be able to track the visits that those pages receive, but if they mention Book-It Theatre and link to us, we can see, oh yes, look, the Minneapolis Journal wrote about us and they linked to us, and we can see what the reviews are from there.

C. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party blog posts.

D. Local and national ranking, organic visits. For these Book-It content pages, of course, we can track our local and national rankings and the organic visits.

Each of these, and as a whole, the contribution of search visits from non-Seattle regions, so we can remove Seattle or Washington State in our analytics and we can see: How much traffic did we get from there? Was it more than last year? What's it contributing to the ticket sales conversion funnel?

You can see how, if you build these smart goals and you measure them correctly and you align them with what the company and the marketing team is trying to do, you can build something really special. You can get great involvement from the rest of your teams, and you can show the value of SEO even to people who might not believe in it already.

First, I really dig this post/episode. I think this overall concept of starting with the business and marketing goals is often missed in larger discussions.

Second, I think the use of the word “goals” with most of the SEO activities is misplaced. Most of the activities described there are tactics that would generate some very interesting diagnostic metrics that would show positive movement in the organic search channel; however, they don’t tie back to the business goals. If you do all those activities and see all that movement in top of funnel growth, link profiles, etc. and sales still don’t go up, then you’ve failed. You still need to look at how the revenue from the organic channel has changed over time to show that the collection of tactics you’ve executed (not goals, those are tactics) have contributed to the overall growth.

Thanks Jeff! Good to see you here :-) Agree that a lot of SEO work results in incremental progress, but in my experience, that typically adds up to (or can/should add up to) meeting a specific, numeric goal (or at least a measurable one, e.g. a particular growth rate, a traffic number, a conversions number, etc).

Well put Rand! I've found that it's so important to clients to inform them that there's more to SEO than rankings. I can't believe how many people approach me with the one goal of 'being number one'. There's just a bit more to it than that ;)

Love the 2 examples you gave Rand, as I feel they are both extremely common and relatable to real client experiences and goal setting. Also, keeping tracking of organic search visits and link metrics (as well as the other 5 metrics you recommended) is so helpful when looking at the SEO goals for your company or clients, as opposed to alot of people who just keep track of rankings unfortunately.

Great article indeed. Specially the Measurable goal metrics was very informative. However, it's a bit complex to understand for those who don't have proper knowledge in this field. But still, some want to make their website popular whatever it takes. But due to lack of knowledge, they get some hurdle at the beginning and get frustrated. I think the article (named: How To SPEED UP Indexing Your WordPress Site In Google) written at "fluentthemes" under Wordpress section will help them understand how start from the sketch as it is written in such a way which should be easy to understand for the beginners.

The most important thing was the first bit - business goals first. What I've found in the chaos of agency life is that SEO is a very small part of the much larger marketing mix serving a brand, and can at times feel disconnected from the big picture business and brand goals the agency is working toward with the client. And especially with more junior SEOs or more fragmented accounts, I see a lot of goal-setting happening backwards (if goal-setting happens at all) - i.e. SEO goals are set in a totally separate swim lane based on what we know about SEO, not what we know about the brand's focus and priorities for the year or even the immediate campaign at hand. What happens is no one cares about the SEO goals because they don't line up to the brand/business goals everyone else is working on, SEO gets deprioritized or overlooked entirely, results have no context for clients and colleagues, and the SEO expert is just checking boxes on SEO best practices instead of choosing smart, high-impact priorities that move the whole marketing mix forward and the client actually cares about. /monologue

"results have no context for clients and colleagues, and the SEO expert is just checking boxes on SEO best practices instead of choosing smart, high-impact priorities"

This absolutely reflects my experience working for the SEO arm of a full-service digital agency. In my experience, it can be difficult to get the executive team to buy into customization around each individual client's business goals when there's such a fixation on scalability. Machine-like production can require a level of standardization/streamlining ("checking boxes"), but I absolutely agree that SEO needs to be one of many spokes in the wheel of the business' marketing - not always sure how to marry the two though.

Thanks for sharing this post with the Moz community! What you mentioned about putting company goals before SEO goals was really insightful. As organisations, be they businesses or non-profit organisations, start using SEO tactics, there can be a tendency to overlook the organisation's core mission in favour of achieving particular SEO goals. You brought home the point that smaller goals need to tie back to the organisation's overall goal really well and this is something that all organisations should take to heart.

In case of my business website, we have hired full time SEO. And I probably push them to target those queries which I received in my offline marketing. With our customers interactions. Just like the seasonal products which have great sale in the season, I recommended him for targeting this brand categories, this products. Most important thing is that, which ekywords we targtet for thoese deep products which achived on top in less time period.

That's a great SEO Strategy applicable for any business which not only helps to accurately track SEO performance but also compare it 1:1 with other corresponding marketing activities (i.e. social, paid etc) as well. The only issue which I feel would start from now is with regards to Geo-targeting in Analytics due to GDPR, so I reckon one way of improving this is by using campaign tracking parameters which isnt so effective but would help

I think quality traffic is more important than quantity. A low 100 search volume keyword probably will be better than a 10.000 volumen keyword if the first is about the best products or services of a company (probably the ones who give more benefit) and the second one is a keyword of that mentions in a generic form a keyword that in only some cases the motivation of the search was to find the product or service your company sells.

Solid perspective here Rand and I definitely agree with working from Company Goals > Marketing Goals > SEO Goals, to make sure that your SEO goals are helping the company grow, based on the marketing goals they relate to. Keeping track of the 7 measurable goal metrics is important is well, instead of solely tracking rankings or solely tracking traffic.

I actually like having just a simple, one-page document that outlines the big picture strategies and goals. Literally just in Word or Google Docs. I think if you can simplify your goals to what fits on a single page, it's clarifying and focusing in all the right ways. Definitely recommended :-)

As connecting SEO goals to Marketing and company goals is so important to convince people to keep investing in SEO, measuring success, and then making sure the right people see it, is vital.

One thing I want to suggest on top of just measuring Organic search visits, is to make sure you have an attribution model in place for first interaction.

It’s possible that many more of your company’s sales should be attributed to SEO, simply because the first visit to a site was referred from Search, but the actual (2nd or even 5th) session which led to the conversion, was referred by a different channel (direct/referrals/social). I often hear from folks who didn't think checking it, and measuring your first click attribution is both quite simple to execute, and important for your funnel understanding.

Rand: As a soccer enthusiast I appreciate the video graphic of the bicycle kick! Far too often company and marketing goals differ. Getting everyone on the same page is vital. Thanks for using the KISS method of SEO instruction--"keep it simple stupid."

Great WBF! So many clients of ours have had nothing SEO "pros" not connect the dots to the business objectives. We always star there, then move on to brand objectives, and then customer objectives. Once all of those are aligned then we can get down to the actual strategy component of how to utilize SEO to drive revenue or whatever other goal should be prioritized.

According to my marketing plan I always tell my SEO to work for seasonal products. And i rally want to say here I got good traffic from them, which keyword we target for deep pages they easily achieved on top.

I'm still focusing on increasing organic traffic, so my path is very clear for now. Once I've reached my initial goals on content, ranks, backlinks, etc, it will be time to start to increase conversion rates. The interesting thing is that I can use the exact same structure Rand presented on this post to stablish my new goals in the future, it's pretty potent and easy to use!

Pretty cool topic. This is a great way to tell (and so them understand) other marketers that SEO is needed and how it can help in their efforts.We are makeing progress and changing the way Online marketing is being analyzed and how strategies now consider more and more SEO efforts.

I think they're fine for very tactical types of measurement, e.g. how can I compete in these SERPs? or why aren't we outranking this page/site?, but I don't like them as strategic metrics -- increasing DA/PA doesn't actually *do* anything for you or your business. It may correlate with better Google rankings and more traffic, which might improve your marketing and get you customers, but it's an indirect measurement and should be treated as such.

Not dissimilar to looking at various inputs that go into a conversion path. We measure things like bounce rate and time on site, but they might not directly connect to the number of email signups or purchases.

It is important for everyone associated with SEO to have a goal else we will be moving pointlessly behind the ever-changing client's requirements. Thanks for helping us with smart seo goals. I got some points which I was missing with my goal strategy previously. Many thanks!

Hi, I am just the beginner of SEO, I was unaware of the few SEO things before I saw your article. Man, this article greatly helped me a lot to improve my blog. Firstly I liked your presentation i.e along with example links. I have seen rarely such a greatly presented article. I request to post more articles on more SEO strategies and examples. Thank you, Thanks a lot for the article

DA is trust to boost difficut keyword, But the end game of search engine is to add comunication, such as for purchasing of a product or service, subscribing to a newsletter, joining a discussion group, and other. In the past, using search engine marketing

Just likes what you said, SEO is a part of Marketing Goal and How we as consultant can contribute in Company / Business Goal.

We do give our Team SEO Goals including all what you mentioned, other than this we do ask them to give us the matrix for our nearest competitors too, so we can understand the pace of progress! Do you think this is a good idea ?

As a beginner to SEO , the post is really helpful eventhough it took me two days and I am sure as I follow more of your posts, it will make me easy to get the tactics to understand SEO better. Thank you for the posts....